Text of speech by DA Parliamentary Leader, Lindiwe Mazibuko MP, in the debate on the President's State of the Nation Address, Parliament, Cape Town, February 19 2013

South Africa has lost confidence in President Jacob Zuma

Note to editors: The following speech will be delivered by Lindiwe Mazibuko MP, Democratic Alliance Parliamentary Leader, during the State of the Nation debate today. 

Honourable Speaker: 

The South African people have lost confidence in President Jacob Zuma. And his State of the Nation Address showed why. 

With the pressure of re-election lifted, this was an opportunity for the President to show leadership after he received a new mandate from his party at Mangaung.

But this Address not only failed to inspire South Africa, it was devoid of new ideas and vision. 

The nation had waited expectantly for the President to speak directly about how his government would implement the National Development Plan. 

The anger at his failure to do so is felt across South Africa. 

We all support the NDP, and the Address should have been a turning point for a country which feels a lack of confidence in the national government. 

But instead this was the offering of a Presidency founded on compromise. One built entirely upon mediating the bitter factions that threaten to tear the governing alliance apart.  

The President should have plainly set out how the NDP would be put into action and its proposals implemented to fix the economy, education, crime and corruption. 

Instead, he offered a reheated version of last year's broken promises based on spin and lip service, stitched together with announcements about task teams, processes, and accords.   

Ours is a president who says one thing to appease South Africa, and then does another to please himself and his inner circle.

Most importantly, Honourable Speaker, the President's speech failed to provide solutions to the unemployment crisis.

Honourable Members,

The President says he is committed to job creation. But let's look at what he actually does about job creation.

He promised five million new jobs by 2020. But unemployment rose again during his third year in office. The economy has lost half a million jobs since he assumed the presidency.

Has the President ever reflected on what it must feel like to be a young person without a job in South Africa today? Does he feel for the five million South Africans under the age of 34 who are unable to find work?

Because the speech he gave on Thursday didn't sound like he does. 

Does the President empathise with the young unemployed woman who opens her eyes every morning, and sees another wretched and empty day stretching out before her?

She knows she needs a job. She needs the means for her daily survival. But she also needs to feel the pride and dignity that come from work.

The few job opportunities she finds require applicants who have work experience. 

But this young woman has no experience; she needs that first break in order to gain experience. 

How this appalling paradox must frustrate and anger her. How powerless this young woman must feel to change the direction of her life.

Does the Honourable President know the country that this young woman lives in? 

I believe he does not.

How can he, when his response to her circumstances was to announce that the National Rural Youth Corps has enrolled 12 000 young people in "various training programmes"?

When his response to this crisis is a so-called "plan" to create nine Rural Youth Hubs, without defining what these will achieve in terms of job creation. 

How can the Honourable President empathise with the dire circumstance of jobless young South Africans when all he could offer them was vague utterances about learnerships and apprenticeships in State-Owned Enterprises, and the Expanded Public Works Programme?

He knows that none of these target young people.

The worst betrayal of all was the President's abandonment of the Youth Wage Subsidy. This would benefit hundreds of thousands of young people by absorbing them into the formal economy and providing them with real work opportunities. 

By contrast, the so-called "Youth Accord" seems nothing more than a conjurer's trick to divert attention from the fact that this government has allowed COSATU to water down the Youth Wage Subsidy policy. 

South Africa has one of the highest rates of youth unemployment in the world, and the ideas in this youth accord are a weak response to a huge problem.

Honourable Speaker,

The President also claimed to have brought policy certainty to the mining industry. But then he proceeded to raise uncertainty with the threat to increase mining taxes.  

Following the Marikana Tragedy, a wave of unprotected strike action in the sector, and a series of irresponsible statements by members of the government and the ANC about the mining sector, confidence in the industry is at a low ebb.

The President seems to believe that investors will be forced to come here, because we have such vast mineral wealth. But if conditions are not right they will find alternative investment destinations. 

If he continues down this path, the President will be remembered for standing by as our mining industry was decimated, in a country which enjoys the greatest mineral endowment in the world.

Honourable Speaker:

This President's failure to provide economic leadership is mirrored by his failure to fix education. 

The President says he is committed to education. But let's look at what he actually does.

Last year, he claimed that "intensive focus is paying off". But our numeracy and literacy rates are second from last in 144 internationally ranked countries. 

How are our children supposed to learn to read and write without textbooks?

It is impossible to understand how the President did not express outrage that children in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo did not receive their textbooks on time. Why did he not undertake that this would never happen again under his watch? 

Honourable Speaker, this is a President who is out of touch. 

The NDP provides clear solutions to fix the crisis in education, but he ignores them.  

On the one hand, the President rightly said that we need to review teachers' remuneration. But on the other, he completely ignored the proposal of the NDP to link better remuneration with improved performance. 

And, above all, the President failed to commit to making education an essential service, as is the case in the health professions and the police service. 

Completely ignoring the definition of an essential service in the Labour Relations Act, he claimed that education is an essential service because it is something we all care deeply about! 

And then, as repayment for the re-election debt he owes to COSATU, the President endorsed teachers' unconditional right to strike. 

We know there can be no meaningful expression of freedom unless a child can reach her full potential. An education is what defines her life chances.

Until the President pursues this goal with the same energy and enthusiasm with which he pursues his own re-election, his words will be as meaningless in practice as they are on paper.

Mr Speaker:

While our sense of national pride is strong, our society is broken.

I commend the Honourable President for his statement condemning rape and sexual assault following the horrific murder of Anene Booyson two weeks ago. 

This was a wake-up-call to a society where such crimes have become normalised. 

How many women do we know who have been victims of sexual assault and violence and abuse? 

How many of our mothers, daughters and sisters, our friends, work colleagues and leaders? 

Honourable Members: 

In our society, women are told not to wear mini-skirts in case they "provoke" men to rape them. Battered wives are asked what they did to "anger" their husbands. And political leaders who refer to their female counterparts as "little girl" and "the madam" and "wild whore" and "my dear" are tolerated.

It is in this context that one in three women in our country can expect to be raped in her lifetime. It is in this context that every eight hours, a South African woman is murdered by her intimate partner. 

And it is in this context that Anene Booysen, a 17-year-old young woman from Bredasdorp was subjected to the horror of gang-rape, mutilation and murder at the hands of a group of men not much older than she was. 

Her attackers slit her stomach down to her genitals. They reached into her body, pulled out her intestines and left them lying in the dust next to her. They broke all of her fingers and both her legs. They slit her throat and left her for dead. 

Anene Booysen's last words, before she succumbed to her unimaginable injuries, were: "I'm tired and sore".

Honourable Speaker, by the time I have finished speaking, over 200 women will have been raped in South Africa today.

Our country is tired, and it is sore.

If we truly cherish Anene's memory then we cannot be powerless bystanders. 

We encourage the Honourable President to participate in a national dialogue to end this evil with the same clarity of conviction that marked the fight against apartheid.  

Will the Honourable President provide a detailed government plan to deal with sexual offences in his reply to this debate? 

I hope he will not simply convene yet another task team.

Because the President's fallback position is always to establish task teams. 

The clearest example of this is corruption. The President says he is committed to fighting corruption. But let's look at what he actually does about corruption.

We had expected the President to appoint a head of the Special Investigating Unit: A post that has been vacant for over a year. But he did not, perhaps because he knows that the SIU will look into his actions in the same way that it must those of any public figure, regardless of their office.
 
Most presidents' characters are revealed over time. This president was compromised from the beginning because there were simply too many unanswered questions about his actions before he assumed high office. 

The Supreme Court of Appeal ordered the National Prosecuting Authority and President Zuma's lawyers to hand over the so-called spy tapes to the Democratic Alliance almost one year ago. 

These tapes, we believe, form part of the "reduced record of decision" of documents, memoranda and transcripts which led to the NPA's decision to drop more than 700 charges of fraud and money laundering against him.  

The Honourable President has been unable to exercise leadership because these documents were the founding documents of his Presidency. 

Honourable Speaker:

The Nkandla-gate scandal towers above all in the public mind. The President's private compound is being paid for by the hard-pressed public to the tune of over R200 million. Yet he failed to mention Nkandla even once in his State of the Nation Address. 

To the President's lasting shame, his ministers deployed one of apartheid's most sinister laws, the National Key Point Act, to cover up how the upgrade of his private home is being paid for.

The government then self-appointed yet another task team, only to declare that its findings would not be made public.

Today, I ask the Honourable President: How could he have allowed the upgrade to proceed knowing how overstretched the country's resources are?

Will he commit in his reply to put right this wrong? Will he support the extension of this probe into a parliamentary investigation? And will he commit to making the findings of the Public Works investigation public?

If he fails to meet these basic requirements of accountability, Nkandla will forever stand as a symbol of corruption. 

Mr Speaker:

We, however, are not without hope.

There will be a day; a day when every person will be able to turn the despair of others into hope.

We all know that the potential for greatness lies within South Africa. Consider just one endeavor in 2013: A radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array, will soon rise in the Karoo. 

This instrument will search the furthest reaches of the heavens. We will find answers to some of the deepest questions about the universe. 

This leads us to the biggest South African paradox of all. 

South Africa has discovered the means to uncover how the first stars and galaxies began. Yet our poorest school children learn in mud schools and under the shade of trees.

We see clearly that South Africa has reached a fork in the road.
  
In less than 18 months we all will pass our verdict on this president and government. 

South Africa cannot afford six more wasted years.

Last May, I urged President Zuma not to seek re-election in December, and to put the needs of the country before his own interests. He did not, and South Africa's crisis of leadership has deepened.

In November, I tabled a Motion of No Confidence in the President with the mandate and support of eight opposition parties in this House. 

The governing party ran scared because it was frightened that its own members would show the President the exit. And the ANC's party managers twisted the democratic process with stonewalling tactics. 

If the Honourable President knew that he had Parliament's confidence to lead, he would have asked that the ANC allow the debate immediately. 

But he did not. 

As soon as the Constitutional Court hands down its ruling, I intend to retable the motion. This time the ANC will not be able to abuse its majority to delay the debate.

There will be a day; a day when this president and government will be removed from office at the ballot box. 

Honourable Speaker,

We have already seen the future and it is blue. 

An ANC administration in the North West Province was recently removed though a Motion of No Confidence by the Democratic Alliance in Tlokwe Municipality. 

In a few short weeks, the DA has laid the foundation of a capable administration. I was not surprised when the President himself made a rushed and panicked visit to Tlokwe Municipality last week. 

He knows that when the DA is given a mandate to govern, it spells the end of the ANC's electoral dominance. Because where the DA governs, we deliver to all. 

This is why, despite the grave problems South Africa faces, the DA has never been so optimistic and confident that our nation will triumph.

There will be a day; a day when the DA will serve the entire nation, as we have been given the privilege to serve in the Western Cape.

Our message is clear: South Africa is a great country being let down by a weak President. He is the wrong man for these times. 

The President and his party may have had young people's voices silenced on FNB's website, but they cannot stop these young voices from being heard in the most powerful place of all: the ballot box. 

There will be a day; a day when the voices of young South Africans everywhere will finally be heard;

A day when our country's confidence in its own greatness will be restored;

When we have a president who puts South Africa first; and a government that cares for young people who are without hope, and for the elderly who walk in fear;

There will be a day; a day when South Africa soars under the leadership of a new president and a government led by the Democratic Alliance.

I thank you.

Issued by the DA, February 19 2013

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